#AI#EU#GenerativeAI#Mistral#Microsoft#BigTech#Monopolies#SiliconValley: "Max von Thun, Europe director at the Open Markets Institute, told Jacobin that the new partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI is symptomatic of the “huge structural concentration that you see in the tech sector, which is not new, which has been around for a long time, but which has basically put the big tech companies in a position to essentially co-opt or neutralize any potential players in AI who might challenge them directly.”
Mistral has built its identity around its open-source model that can be modified and adapted by clients. What it stands to gain from its partnership with Microsoft is access to the latter’s enormous computing power and key position in market infrastructure.
“Here’s the catch: I can build an open-source model, but the challenge is to get it to the market and to the customer. As a company, that is what I care about,” Kris Shrishak, senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, told Jacobin. “Distribution is a problem because they’re still a business. They need to make money. Microsoft gives them a pathway to that, by integrating it and offering it on their Azure marketplace." https://jacobin.com/2024/03/mistral-france-eu-monopoly-ai-regulation
#EA#EffectiveAltruism#SiliconValley: "C: So it sounds like the EA work was not just an excuse to sit around, but an excuse not to do laundry.
E: Pretty much. There’s something so strange about people like taking themselves and their time so seriously that they think about things like replaceability and is it better to have someone else doing this thing because my time is better spent doing that or like should I pursue this particular job if there’s someone else there who could do it just as well are better than I could have been, so I should do something else, just as like really intense emphasis on how you use your time on the that level is kind of weird and unhealthy.
C: Yeah, it sounds like it’s very economic talk, like very much competitive advantage, as in you want to optimize your competitive advantage versus optimizing your quality of life or your happiness or how much love you have.
E: Exactly. And yeah, I think there’s this intense emphasis on rationality and logic, which I think appealed to me at first, because I’m a very logical person, and I was a philosophy student. I mean, in some ways, a lot of the EA thinking is great. Like, for example, when you’re thinking about where to donate, I think it’s great that you put the emphasis on logic and on research, right? Like, let’s actually give money to the organizations that are cost-effective and where the money is gonna make the most difference instead of just the ones that have the biggest brand-new budget, so you’ve heard of them. And in that way, I think that the emphasis of logic is great, but then I think in a lot of ways they take it way too far to the point where you’re losing things like emotion and empathy and passion."
Actually, let me use this as an example of how everything has gone wrong with web development in the last decade or so.
Dan Abramov is a very brilliant guy who is part of the Facebook's React team. He has been the most important name in the team working on React for years. And now, they are pushing for changes in React that would make it consume streams of data that updates the UI before the entire data request is completed, instead of just requesting the data and then 'painting' it once they get the reply for that request.
This is nuts. This is a micro optimization. 95% of the users won't ever notice, and those who do (people using extremely bad connections) would be much better if the site wasn't using React at all. At the same time, I'm sure half of the websites in the World who currently uses react will jump to implement this, making their code way more complex, brittle, sucking their productivity down, and in the long term, being worse for the users. Just for absolutely not even a short-term gain at all in their products.
Then why these kind of things keep happening? Because Facebook is too big. And somehow they ended being the ones in control of the most popular web-app framework used by most of the sites nowadays.
The state of the current Javascript ecosystem is what happens when you get companies with hundreds, thousands of engineers, to build sites that 15 years ago would have been built by 1/10th of that number of people. What you get is a lot of people working on a product that's actually mature already, and whose job end being going after that extra 1%, that last micro optimization that could make your site better in a very narrow set of cases. And they don't care about the complexity, because they are part of an engineering organization with literally thousands of hands to throw at any problem. Setting up your code bundler now takes hundreds of lines of code that need constant maintenance to achieve just a 5% improvement over gzipped plain JavaScript? No big deal, they have 6 people working full time on that. React switching to a different programming paradigm each two versions? Nice, now the 900 devs working in the web version has something to do for a few months.
But then small to medium teams adopt these tools. And suddenly you have a 5, 20, 50 devs team having to do the same work the Facebook web team does. Without any of the problems Facebook has to solve.
What's worse: a big share of the current JavaScript ecosystem exists just to solve problems introduced by the previous iterations. Think about it from a user perspective: does the web work any better, does Netflix, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc load faster, perform better than they did ten years ago? On the contrary, most of us have more powerful computers, phones. We have significantly faster internet connections. But sites are, at best, as fast as they used to ten years ago. In most cases they are even slower.
And from the engineer perspective it's not better: web development is significantly harder, more complex, slower nowadays that what it was ten years ago. Things that were trivial are now complex. Things that were complex still are. Product-wise, we are not doing anything more complex than what we were doing in early to mid 10s. But somehow now everything is harder, involves more code, everything is now orders of magnitude more complex. And it's not even making the web a better experience.
We made this mess. We made the web worse for everyone. We made our jobs harder for ourselves. It's so stupid.
Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray & Siddharth Suri
In the spirit of Nickel and Dimed , a necessary and revelatory expose of the invisible human workforce that powers the web—and that foreshadows the true future of work.
But while it is largely a guide to making money in the new economy he describes, he also implores us to not let it “spiral out of control”. The key to this, he argues, is asserting human agency through digital literacy.
What unites many of the misshapen and malevolent encounters between humans and algorithms, Kowalkiewicz argues, is our misunderstandings of what they can do.
An algorithm is a step by step set of instructions – “like a recipe” for a computer. While an algorithm may be very good, even “superhuman” at its job within those defined parameters, these minions require a more adaptable human brain to help them overcome unforeseen challenges.
Flexibility and interpretation, Kowalkiewicz writes, are skills “not easily reduced to coded rules” and so are areas in which humans can outperform algorithms – for the “foreseeable” future.
#Internet#InternetFreedom#DigitalRights#AI#SiliconValley: "There can only be one conclusion from all of this: the digital revolution has failed. The initial promise was a deception to lay the foundation for another corporate value-creation scheme, but the benefits that emerged from it have been so deeply eroded by commercial imperatives that the drawbacks far outweigh the remaining redeeming qualities — and that only gets worse with every day generative AI tools are allowed to keep flooding the web with synthetic material.
The time for tinkering around the edges has passed, and like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the only hope to be found today is in seeking to tear down the edifice the tech industry has erected and to build new foundations for a different kind of internet that isn’t poisoned by the requirement to produce obscene and ever-increasing profits to fill the overflowing coffers of a narrow segment of the population.
There were many networks before the internet, and there can be new networks that follow it. We don’t have to be locked into the digital dystopia Silicon Valley has created in a network where there was once so much hope for something else entirely. The ongoing erosion already seems to be sending people fleeing by ditching smartphones (or at least trying to reduce how much they use them), pulling back from the mess that social media has become, and ditching the algorithmic soup of streaming services.
Personal rejection is a welcome development, but as the web declines, we need to consider what a better alternative could look like and the political project it would fit within. We also can’t fall for any attempt to cast a libertarian “declaration of independence” as a truly liberatory future for everyone."
California Forever, the billionaire-backed effort to create a new community from scratch in Solano County, has begun collecting signatures to try to put its initiative on the November ballot. Here’s our look at the promises by the company, and how they would affect county and state taxpayers.
I've been away from the platform for a while because I felt overwhelmed, though I'm not even sure by what. It was just a period filled with events, and I couldn't handle it, I guess. I've been away from not just the platform, but many things that matter to me: chats with friends I care about, online projects—everything felt utterly beyond my reach. I could only focus on surviving. This evening, I'm feeling different and I hope to remain in this state for the months ahead.
‘The Devil in Silicon Valley
Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans’ by Stephen J. Pitti. This book covers the history of racism against Mexican-Americans within #siliconvalley in #california from the Gold Rush to the #tech industry of today. #exploitation#latino#chicano@bookstodon
#OpenAI clapped back at #ElonMusk in its first public response to his lawsuit, publishing a blog post w/ old emails showing that the billionaire lobbied to merge the #AI lab w/ #Tesla & use the car company as a “CashCow.” #Musk’s lawsuit accuses OpenAI, which he helped found, of abandoning its original #nonprofit mission of making advanced AI beneficial to humanity.
#Musk’s complaint, filed last wk in SF Superior Court, alleged that #OpenAI violated its founding agreement by becoming a #ForProfit co, raising funds from #Microsoft & becoming more secretive.
The msgs shared by OpenAI shed light on one of the most closely-scrutinized founding stories in #SiliconValley history. Industry insiders immediately pored over the emails…w/some attempting to use the latest #AI tools to un-redact sentences.
#Journalism#Media#News#TechJournalism#BigTech#SiliconValley: "In the end, Burn Book is the story of one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent access journalists who took a page from the billionaires she covered and created her own narrative to see and present herself as something else entirely. The story Swisher is trying to tell helps to distance herself from the decades she spent boosting companies that have now been “disastrous,” as she herself admits, but it also works for the industry. Letting Swisher present herself as a tough reporter allows Silicon Valley to pretend it was being held to account this whole time — when really Swisher was along for the ride and bought into the tech determinist worldview guiding the industry.
Swisher is a great example of what went wrong in tech reporting through Silicon Valley’s long boom, from the starting gun of internet privatization to the post-Trump techlash. Journalists like Swisher got far too close to the people they covered and bought into the lies they were weaving as the money rushed in and everyone got rich. They got too absorbed in the deceptive story the industry told itself to question whether it all made sense, even as they helped sell the narrative of tech’s promise and inevitability to the public. Now we’re all dealing with the fallout of that period, and while some have admitted they got it wrong, far too many are trying to pretend they were asking the hard questions the whole time." https://disconnect.blog/kara-swishers-reality-distortion-field/
Oh, by the way, since the optimisations I made on the bundle size, it now takes ~3.61 seconds to download and install Kitten¹ on my machine and ~1 second to update it (the initial install takes longer as Kitten downloads its own Node.js runtime and that takes the bulk of the time).
Every second you don’t spend waiting for something is a second you can spend doing something else 🤓
Rebecca Solnit wrote: “I don’t know whether these #billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 & used their wealth to undermine its diversity & affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets & push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.
By producing such extremes of wealth, tech is returning us to a kind of feudalism, with a few powerful figures accountable to no one. Here’s #ElonMusk, the world’s richest person, who invited in misinformation, disinformation & hate, providing a platform for extreme right-wingers, racists & #conspiracy theorists, while also using his #Starlink#satellite technology first for & then against the Ukrainian military in their conflict with #Russia. ” #SanFrancisco#SiliconValley
In @parismarx latest Disconnect update he highlights Chris Person's two questions people should be asking everytime the Silicon Valely techbro people churn out the latest "greatest" thing, like that shiteous video stuff: " how much energy is used to churn out this sludge (my words) and what dataset is the model trained on" #ai#SiliconValley
Apple has very publicly told you to go fuck yourselves with its malicious compliance. What you do next will decide whether malicious compliance is acceptable in the EU or not.
@noondlyt
Me neither.
But this is where we are now.
Also, without looking it up:
@timnitGebru had a thread some months ago about #SiliconValley finance and how you needed to be in the #TECREAL community to get any real founding--and a white male "bro."
I'm not sure if was in here article or another, but it seems that only one tech woman ever made it into that billionaires' club by her own merit and not through marriage.
"Let's not fuck around here. Tech is powered by bullshit. It's the only sustainable energy source Silicon Valley's would-be elite have successfully harnessed. It’s a world rife with exaggerated claims, wealth inequality, and workaholism wearing a mask of passion."